These are the most crucial considerations for corporate enterprises in choosing a hardware platform. The underlying server hardware functions as the foundational element for the business’ entire infrastructure and interconnected environment. Today’s 21st century Digital Age networks are characterized by increasingly demand-intensive workloads; the need to use Big Data analytics to analyze and interpret the massive volumes and variety of data to make proactive decisions and keep the business competitive. Security is a top priority. It’s absolutely essential to safeguard sensitive data and Intellectual Property (IP) from sophisticated, organized external hackers and defend against threats posed by internal employees.

The latest IBM z13s enterprise server delivers embedded security, state-of-the-art analytics and unparalleled reliability, performance and throughput. It is fine tuned for hybrid cloud environments. And it’s especially useful as a secure foundational element in Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. The newly announced, z13s is highly robust: it supports the most compute-intensive workloads in hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. The newest member of the z Systems family, the z13s, incorporates advanced, embedded cryptography features in the hardware that allow it to encrypt and decrypt data twice as fast as previous generations, with no reduction in transactional throughput owing to the updated cryptographic coprocessor for every chip core and tamper-resistant hardware-accelerated cryptographic coprocessor cards.

In 2016 and beyond, infrastructure reliability is more essential than ever.

The overall health of network operations, applications, management and security functions all depend on the core foundational elements: server hardware, server operating systems and virtualization to deliver high availability, robust management and solid security. The reliability of the server, server OS and virtualization platforms are the cornerstones of the entire network infrastructure. The individual and collective reliability of these platforms have a direct, immediate and long lasting impact on daily operations and business results. For the seventh year in a row, corporate enterprise users said IBM server hardware delivered the highest levels of reliability/uptime among 14 server hardware and 11 different server hardware virtualization platforms. A 61% majority of IBM Power Systems servers and Lenovo System x servers achieved “five nines” or 99.999% availability – the equivalent of 5.25 minutes of unplanned per server /per annum downtime compared to 46% of Hewlett-Packard servers and 40% of Oracle server hardware.

Eight out of 10 — 82% — of the over 600 respondents to ITIC’s 2014-2015 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability survey say security issues negatively impact overall server, operating system and network reliability. Of that figure a 53% majority of those polled say that security vulnerabilities and hacks have a “moderate,” “significant” or “crucial impact on network availability and uptime (See Exhibit 1).

Overall, the latest ITIC survey results showed that organizations are still more reactive than proactive regarding security threats. Some 15% of the over 600 global corporate respondents are extremely lax: some seven percent said that security issues have no impact on their environment while another eight percent indicated that they don’t keep track of whether or not security issues negatively affect the uptime and availability of their networks. In contrast, 24% of survey participants or one-in-four said security has a “significant” or “crucial” negative impact on network reliability and performance.

Still, despite the well documented and high profile hacks into companies like Target, eBay, Google and other big name vendors this year, the survey found that seven-out-of-10 firms – 70% – are generally confident in the security of their hardware, software and applications – until they get hacked.